OK… so I’m the last guy to blog about it, but we finally shipped a somewhat real version of Windows Live, or as I call it, just Live. The crown jewel is Image Search — the team just rocked out some great stuff there. Infinite scroll just rocks for images, and the preview pane is also a great way to view them. It’s totally kick ass.

Now, for those wondering about Web search… don’t worry too much about the UI for Web Search… the experienced eye will notice a ton of stuff is missing for no good reason (cached page anyone? and date updated?), and some things look very hacked together (overly small typography? weird scrollbar that doesn’t move, while the image search one does?), almost like they were hacked together at 4 AM in preparation for a demo that somehow turned into a beta. Hey, we couldn’t let our VP stand up there at ETech with nothing new for Web Search. But we’re not ready to show our Web Search coolness just yet…

Anyway, my pal Greg Linden wrote up a great article about how he sees Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google battling it out (also cribbed a bunch from ZDNet). Here’s a quick summary:

MSN (and, until recently, A9) wants to give you more powerful tools. Yahoo wants the community of users to help improve search. Google wants computers to do all the work to get you what you need.

I disagree with him here.

Yahoo is going down the content ownership path. The idea is to own the content — whether it be licensed from whomever actually makes it (such as music or movies), the other is to create technology that enables their customers to create content, which they’ll have and Microsoft and Google won’t. A super successful model for this is Naver.com in Korea, which dominates that market (Google is like 2% market share there) because of a huge community that answers peoples questions directly and provides all the other portal-like services. However, you have a huge cold-start problem (nobody will use what Yahoo has until they have critical mass) and a huge spam problem. I believe Naver solved it by being something for Koreans before there were any engines for Korea, and requiring their users to enter the equivalent of the Social Security Number (apparently a socially acceptable thing in Korea), so there is a ton of accountability there. I’m not sure if Yahoo will solve it though… and quite frankly I don’t think it matters. But more about that in a later post.

Google and Microsoft have generally the same idea, although Microsoft has been slow to coming around to it. The old saying is that a computer will give you what you ask for, not what you want. Both Google and Microsoft are trying to give you what you want, not what you ask for.

The difference is in approach. Google, like some other companies like Apple, are fans of making things easy. How do you make things easy? Remove choice. That single-button mouse Apple is famous for? Means you always know which button to push. The Google homepage is a model for simplicity guiding the user to what makes Google money… Web searches. There’s a big search box, and not much else. Hard to do something besides enter a query… and everytime they add something to it, it’s a big deal.

Microsoft wants to make its products useful. And how do you make a product useful? It’s all about features. That’s why Live.com is just chock-full of random features, such as RSS feeds and weather and all the other normal portal goodies. Greg got things a bit wrong in his article… it isn’t about changing what users do, but providing them with what they need to get their job done. If a simple search box will suffice, great. But sometimes other things are better suited, and Microsoft is looking at how to provide those as well.

Great thing for you? Search is gonna get better… much, much, much better. And you’re all going to benefit. Gotta love it.